Electronic document editors are widely used in homes and businesses today. Familiar examples of these editors include word processing programs that operate on personal computers (PCs) and note-taking programs that operate on personal data assistants (PDAs). Some of these programs combine the attributes of word processing programs and note-taking programs by allowing a user to insert both ink and text data in the same document. These programs strive to replace paper as the simplest means to record and communicate information. However, to replace and enhance paper's utility, the electronic document editor must allow the user to search through documents containing both ink and text data so that a user can find information previously stored on the electronic documents.
While search methods for conventional word processing programs are well known in the art, the same cannot be said for search methods for note-taking programs containing ink data. Conventional note-taking programs have difficulty consistently recognizing ink data input by a user. Therefore, when the user attempts to search through the ink data, the search is only as successful as the ink recognition software of the note-taking program. In an effort to increase recognition of the ink data, conventional note-taking programs generate multiple possible matches for each ink word entered on a tablet.
While the generation of multiple possible matches improved the likelihood of matching the word entered onto the tablet by a user, problems related to searching still remained. First, many search programs only reviewed the first possible match to ink data when searching through an electronic document. These search programs were prone to missing the data the user was searching for when the search query was input. Additionally, some programs have attempted to generate documents covering each possible ink data match in order to conduct the search query. For example, if the program typically generated five possible matches for each word containing ink data, a document having one sentence that contained one word of ink data would generate five different sentences. Each sentence represents a different possible ink data match. While this method may be successful for documents containing one or two ink words, the number of permutations of the document grows, exponentially with each additional ink word in the document. Such growth would slow down the computer significantly to the point where search queries would be more hindrance than help.
Also, while conventional search programs have been created to, search electronic documents containing ink data or text data, no search program currently exists that can receive a search query from a user and search an electronic document containing both ink and text data.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for a single method to allow a user to search for terms in an electronic document containing either ink data, text data, or both. Furthermore, there is a need in the art for an improved method of searching electronic documents that contain multiple possible matches for ink data.